Sylvester Stallone acknowledges that his early career rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger affected both of their careers.
“We were very confrontational,” Stallone, 80, said on the Thursday, November 5, episode of “The Rest Is Entertainment” podcast, noting that the rift inspired him to take more risks as an actor. “You have two people arriving at the beginning of a different genre, and we both want to be in charge of that genre.”
He continued, “I never wanted to be an action guy, but I did First Blood, and I said, ‘This is interesting because action films, if done right, is modern mythology.’ It’s like what they used to do, you know, Iliad and the Odyssey and Hercules and Achilles.”
Stallone claimed he “could tell right away” that Schwarzenegger, 79, would “be a problem” for his career aspirations.
“We were at the Golden Globe Awards, and he’s sitting there, and he’s eyeballing me,” he recalled of the 1977 ceremony. “I said, ‘OK, all right. I got it, pal.’ Then, he wins [Best Newcomer]. I went, ‘Give me a break.’”
Schwarzenegger won the trophy for Stay Hungry before Stallone’s Rocky took home the prize for Best Motion Picture — Drama.
“We win for Rocky, and he’s looking at me, and I throw flowers on him, like, a bowl of flowers. I made like I was celebrating like, ‘Yay,’ and the gauntlet was thrown and it was on,” Stallone said. “Right then you knew we were both gonna be antagonistic because that’s who he is. He likes to challenge, I like to challenge, and we’re both physical.”
As Stallone and Schwarzenegger battled to be the “vanguard” and “the leader” of the genre, they each headlined a series of action flicks.
“It went back and forth, back and forth on and off screen. It was very contentious, trust me, which I enjoyed,” Stallone noted. “We fought to make the next action film … [and] it just kept elevating.”
For Schwarzenegger, he saw Stallone’s flower toss at the Globes as “the beginning of a battle.”
“It just developed from then on,” Schwarzenegger told TMZ in November 2025. “Now, I had to chase him. He did Rocky II and then Rocky III and all these movies, and it kept going up and up. My salary was 10 percent of his. When he got $2 million, I got $200,000. … I had to chase behind him, and I said, ‘This has to stop.’ I had to kind of catch up to that. It gave me motivation, and this is what the whole thing was about. It became very, very competitive.”
Stallone and Schwarzenegger have since put their feud to rest.
“It wasn’t put to bed until, like, 20 years later when he decided to run for governor,” Stallone explained on Thursday. “We went to the same cigar place, and he was there. I said, ‘You know, enough of this. We’re not in competition, [you’re] not doing movies anymore. Thank you very much for waking me up, lighting a fire under me.’ He felt the same way.”
